doc/licensing.md

# Licensing

git-trace is **source-available** under the Business Source License
1.1 (see `LICENSE`). It is not "open source" and we do not call it
that — the words are honest on purpose.

## What the license means

| who | terms |
|-----|-------|
| individuals, homelabbers, students | free, including production self-hosting |
| non-profits and open-source projects | free, including production use |
| for-profit organizations in production | commercial license — flat, per instance |
| anyone, on each version's Change Date | that version becomes Apache-2.0 |

The pricing model is **flat per instance, per year** — never
per-seat. Per-seat licensing punishes growth and contradicts the
product's own philosophy of simplicity.

## Why this shape

- The product's only defensible differentiator is legibility:
  "a forge you can read in a weekend". Closing the source would
  kill the pitch; source-available keeps it.
- A single edition, everything included. No crippled community
  build, no `#ifdef` wall, no CLA machinery.
- Companies pay for being companies, not for missing features.
  If an enterprise tier ever exists it sells organisational scale
  (SSO, org namespaces, compliance export, HA, managed hosting) —
  not withheld forge features.
- We sell licenses, not our sleep: no hosted SaaS until the
  support economics justify it.

## Why not the alternatives

| model | why rejected |
|-------|-------------|
| proprietary SaaS | kills the auditability pitch, incurs ops liability on other people's data |
| AGPL + EE (open core) | needs a CLA to relicense external contributions; AGPL itself deters corporate adoption; dual-edition overhead is disproportionate for a ~15k-LOC codebase |
| MIT/Apache, hope for support revenue | no protection against SaaS clones; revenue never materialises |
| AGPL pure | permits free commercial *internal* use — monetises redistribution, not usage |

## The promise that prevents backlash

Licence friction becomes a scandal only when terms change under
people's feet. Our rules:

1. never label the project "open source" — say source-available;
2. terms declared at release apply to that release forever —
   BUSL enforces this structurally via the Change Date;
3. one edition: what you download is the whole product.